A German blogger wrote on the Sun's website last week: "There is English football desaster [sic] called England. They believe to play like Beckham looks, however they play like Rooney looks." As insults go it's a little clunky and even when the big tabloid in Lower Saxony, Braunchsweiger Zeitung took up arms with: "Yes, now we are going to sort out the English girlies" and named Rooney as one, you felt that they were struggling towards the phrase Die Bluse des größen Mädchens – or big girl's blouse – but did not quite get there.

The relationship between the two countries at this level is somehow settled and securely unreconstructed. In 30 years' time, English fans will still be singing about the RAF and the Sun newspaper, if it exists, will be making feeble puns about bratwurst. Incidentally, there should be some sociological study as to why Europeans continue to insult each other by the food we are supposed to eat: the French by their frogs' legs, the English by their rosbif, the Germans by their sauerkraut, the Italians by their pizzas, as in: "We're going to deep fry yer pizzas."

The very odd thing about modern Germany is that it appears to be almost entirely a mystery to the British, who are surprised to discover that the side fielded by Germany today hardly consists of the Aryan specimens on display at the Berlin Olympics. Men of Tunisian, Spanish, Bosnian, Polish and Brazilian ancestry form the German squad, together with the Turkish midfielder Mesut Ozil, who recites the Koran while the German national anthem is sung. To taunt players from the new Germany, freed since 2000 from the rigid nationality laws of 1913, with references to the Second World War is as weird as the stoning of dachshunds in Britain at the outset of the First World War. But the irrelevance of the jibes, and the taboo about mentioning the war, is precisely what makes it all so funny to the British, which I suppose says something about us.

That Germany is the economic star of modern Europe is the single fact grudgingly accepted by the British; that it is a very successful society that has managed to absorb an entire communist country with its dragooned, state-reliant masses and not lose its ways is less acknowledged. We remain suspicious of the German character when it comes to sun-loungers and convinced that we are, and always will be, the superior democracy with a kind of genetic respect for freedom. Yet in the post-9/11 world this is simply not true. While the British accepted without demur the state's attack on their freedoms and privacy, the Germans staunchly adhered to the Basic Law, a kind of modern Magna Carta that is updated by the courts but never altered by legislators.

The preamble to the Basic Law is moving because it declares a responsibility to the freedom of other countries: "Conscious of their responsibility before God and man, inspired by the determination to promote world peace as an equal partner in a united Europe, the German people, in the exercise of their constituent power, have adopted this Basic Law." The inalienable rights guaranteed concern for children born out of wedlock, religious teaching in schools, the equality of men and women, the inviolability of the home and the individual's privacy, specifically his right to private communications. If anyone wants to know what a British Bill of Rights could look like, they have only to read Germany's Basic law on the web.

The point is that it has everyday relevance in Germany where there are millions who experienced the very worst of the Nazi and communist tyrannies. They know that freedom has to be defended. When western governments reacted to the Christmas Day "pants bomber" by introducing body scanners at airports, only in Germany did people feel a sense of outrage: hundreds responded with naked protests at airports.

In Germany, they know that when the state strips its citizens bad things follow. In Germany, a person may be held for just two days without being charged. In Britain, we have indefinite house arrest for terror suspects and 28-day detention without charge, as well as an "independent" reviewer of terror laws, Lord Carlile, who shamelessly defends both on national television.

Never much doubting their own national virtues, Europeans feel they have the right to scrutinise German character and periodically remind Germans of their past. Last week, the financier George Soros, a Jew who survived the Holocaust in Hungary, criticised Germany's economic policies as being damaging to less successful states in the European Union, and this was after what seemed to be the hugely generous German bailout of the imprudent Greek government. Because of their cultural fear of inflation, he said, the Germans were addicted to making the signatories to Maastricht follow the tough deficit limits set out in the 1992 treaty.

What might simply have been an economic critique, a contribution to the international debate about deficit reduction versus immediate growth, was made with unambiguous reference to Germany's past. Once, it was military power that threatened Europe; now, it is Germany's economic power. "Unless Germany changes policy, its withdrawal from the currency union would be helpful for the rest of Europe," he told Die Zeit. "At the moment, Germany is pushing its neighbours into deflation: this threatens a long phase of stagnation, leading to nationalism, social unrest and xenophobia. It endangers democracy."

So the German character comes under scrutiny again, not the romanticism of Beethoven, Goethe and Caspar David Friederich which all Europe admired in the early 19th century, but the martial fanaticism expressed after German unification, when political leaders began to appear in public in steel helmets and the German public came to believe in its self-evident superiority. This was the subject of the Austrian director Michael Haneke's film White Ribbon, which tells the story of a strangely violent and dysfunctional group of children in a German village in 1913, in other words the generation that would vote for Hitler in 1933. Haneke's film asks whether the German character was responsible or the brutalisation experienced by a particular generation.

We feel no qualms about asking that question today or singing about German bombers being shot down, which is why it seems entirely fair – and refreshing – that Germans are replying with a few mild digs about Rooney's lack of form. After all, this is only a football match and we should remember that during the football matches of the 1914-15 Christmas truce we found we had more in common than an old rivalry.